The suburban hellscape that is most residential coded zones is far, far more sardine-like than what I’m describing, which is an environment far more like many cities in Europe that evolved to be, and have been maintained as walkable cities. The reason you’re repulsed by the idea of urban environments is specifically because you’re used to American residential areas that are hard, brutal and packed next to busy highways and multi-lane avenues that are constantly packed with people trying to get to and from work, with huge parking lots that act like hot deserts in the sun, with sprawl and noise and pollution and no good reason to leave your sardine can because there’s nowhere to get to within 30 minutes of walking except more sardine cans.

If a neighborhood is designed to be walkable, you will have condos and apartments and medium to high-density living spaces, sure, but you will have an entirely different aesthetic and atmosphere around it so it feels more welcoming, and encourages community.

If you’re opposed to community entirely, that’s your prerogative, there are still vast, vast tracts of land across the world you can live in and be left alone, and that’s fine. My comment isn’t addressing that lifestyle, because for MOST people, cities represent opportunity, safety and essential services. We can’t look down at the vast bulk of humanity who want to live around other people just because you yourself are bothered by your own memories and experiences of city life.

This entire post will age poorly if we ever transition out of this incredibly self-indulgent and wasteful period of human civilization.

We should have walkable neighborhoods, mass transit of gleaming efficiency, bike lanes as priority, we should be encouraging socializing and creating spaces for people to gather that aren’t profit-driven, but with plans to create comfort and recreation to better the people and foster a sense of belonging to a community. It’s absurd we all live in places with lots of people but have no sense of belonging to a community. This goes against literally millions of years of our own evolutionary history. We NEED community to function and have healthy minds.

I mean, it’s not likely to happen. But maybe when the next great apocalyptic event happens the survivors can try to remake things with a little more planning. After the whole period of darkness and cannibalism of course.

And coming soon to a developed nation near you!

As an aside, some people with issues have used the falling birthrates around the world as an excuse to push for far-right, draconian policies regulating people’s bodies like banning birth-control, criminalizing abortions, and lowered age-of-consent laws.

We need to all make it very clear when this shit comes up that the problem has far more to do with economics and infrastructure than any social moral failing. We need better heathcare and safety nets so couples can afford to have a baby. We need lowered housing costs so people aren’t afraid they will have to raise a family in a single-bedroom studio apartment. We need paid time off and parental leave. We need mass-transit so a family with two working parents don’t also have to afford two cars. It’s fucking ASBURD how much American families are getting fleeced.

If our policies and politics actually cared about taking care of our future, they would be making it easier for families to have babies and adjusting the world, not still expecting people to have to work two-jobs for twenty years to save up enough for a downpayment on a shitty house.

My partner’s family from Philippines grew up in a home without appliances like refrigerators, like many, many people in developing countries.

So while now they have every modern convenience, old habits die hard and stomachs seem to adapt to even the most adverse conditions of foodstuffs.

Not mine. I love their cooking but can only eat food that I’ve seen opened or cooked in front of me. They will legitimately leave meat dishes out on the table for two days or more and then simply “reheat” and consider it good to serve. The cabinets are full of things like mayo, cheese dips, opened gravies and open bottles of fruit juice.

I have had some of the very worst food poisoning in my life from inadvertently eating something there like chicken salad that I thought was fresh, but made with hard-boiled eggs that had been sitting on a counter in summer heat for several days that a “friend” brought over so they “wouldn’t waste.”

Of course I’m the only one that gets sick, so I’m the “special one” that everyone now thinks has some terminal illness and treats me like a hospice patient.

Fact is, for it to work as a placebo, you need to believe it will work.

What’s even wilder is you don’t have to consciously believe it, you can unconsciously believe it and it will still work! Doctors will routinely prescribe placebos and be very open about the fact that it’s just a placebo, that there is no chemical compound in the medication.

And yet, the act of taking a pill from a bottle seems to trigger something. Recent research has actually identified part of this mechanism in rat brains. There really is a part of the brain that can be tricked into releasing a set of chemicals that relieve pain, reduce inflammation and create better moods. Someday we might have a placebo pill that actually has medication in it. Wildly convoluted how the brain works.

I want seats next to nobody. How hard will that be to pull off?

If any pro-deportation voter were to learn exactly what “mass deportation” entailed and actually looked like, they would not only immediately change stance, but they would also question our current system and how much resources we’re spending on chasing individual humans around the country to move them briefly.

They are WWE wrestlemania fans who chant a slogan, paint their faces and repeat the taglines. They don’t even have the most remote ideas or perspectives on what our national infrastructure and policy enforcement look like.

A mass deportation would be the largest, most expensive project we’ve undertaken as a nation, there would be a sacrifice of rights like we’ve never seen, you would have to hire literally a million more agents and give them the power to crawl through anyone’s personal lives, and the infrastructure alone in moving these people around would be a scale that beats our current mass transportation system by miles. Presuming the same powers that formed such overreaching organizations don’t decide to just Holocaust the whole idea and start shipping dark skinned people by train to special camps outside town, and the worst part is there are soup-brained centrists reading this line and rolling their eyes and thinking “Such a thing could never happen in the modern world” from their safe, sheltered lives they assume will never change.

It seems so obviously counterproductive that the only thing I can think is that they’re enjoying it, like it’s a kink to get into other people’s sex lives and tell them what they should and should not do.

No, seriously. If you spend time in the conservative, christian communities like where I grew up, you hear these people just spend night and fucking day thinking about “sin” and the ways that nasty, dirty, eeeeevil sinners like to sin and all the details about what manner of sin they partake in… and so on.

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Next thing you’re going to tell us is that we SHOULDN’T become absolutely obsessed with the personal habits and sex lives of other people whom I will never meet nor be involved with in any way! Preposterous!

The best story I ever heard about this was a single dad who had to take his teenage daughter to the doctor because she got an infection from inserting a toothbrush handle or something else that wasn’t sanitary, and instead of giving her ANY kind of scolding or negative judgement, he was very loving and helped her laugh it off, and then he just left on her pillow a $100 gift card to Adam & Eve or some other large, commercial, adult site that lets you buy gift cards.

I don’t think it’s appropriate to even suggest an age here, but I think as a parent you will know when it’s time to have the talk/leave the card.

It was a measure enacted during wartimes to increase productivity, or at least that’s what they said, because it was never rolled back to pre-war even after the US was no longer engaged.

Always beware what they try to slip through under the guise of patriotism and “unity.”

I cannot fucking stand the fact that we live in the year 2024 and we’re having raging debates about if science has value… ON THE FUCKING GODDAMN INTERNET.

This population deserves the hardships coming, and that’s a really, really terrible thing to say, because the coming hardships are going to be bad.

Do you think people become more conservative with age or is it society becoming more progressive and leaving them behind?

I am getting up there in years and seeing this play out over and over.

I think every generation wants to be more progressive than the last, but we tend to carry baggage of fear and insecurity through the generations. Or more specifically, older people tend to gain the political and monetary capital needed to affect policy and shape our societal outlook and attitude. They will always be more conservative than the younger generation who will want more freedoms and personal rights, inherently, and as the ruling class will clash with newer sensibilities, over and over.

What we’re asking here, is the conservatism reflected in our elders and leadership now broadly more harmful or helpful? Are we out of the touch or is it the kids who are wrong?

I think it’s a mix but mostly it’s not our real problem. Our real problem is that no matter what our age, we have greatly misunderstood how our own existence works. Most people have been taught that they have brains designed to exercise logic and reason and that brains are the best thing ever if you use them and make them smart.

No, our brains are not logical tools. We are not a rational species. There was no “age of enlightenment.” It’s all a hoax. Our brains are tools designed to write a story to explain how you feel. And that’s it. It doesn’t even have to make sense. When we all learn how our brains actually work we will collectively make better decisions, have more compassion for each other, and likely sink into even deeper despair as we all start to realize we have no free will.

We should all be learning that we’re all children. Some of us, over time, gain a lot more baggage and issues, but that shit just layers right on top of the “child” parts so we’re all just basically children with complex problems.

The brain doesn’t “prune” itself. The brain you had when you were 12, you have that same damn brain. It doesn’t change. Stuff just gets added to it.

Almost anyone with an irrational political stance betrays their youth.

Political ideology has always captivated the passions of youth, but isn’t successfully implemented or even internalized except by people with age and experience and emotional regulation.

Bears can be trained to drive cars and communicate through various means, it’s thought they may be as smart as great apes like gorillas. This is why they were a choice circus animal for a long time.

Yes, this should be terrifying information.

Not only are you correct, we will never have any real sense of scale of just how correct you are, since we’ve only been exposed to about less than 0.01% of life that’s ever existed on Earth in the last several billion years.

For all we know there were clans of synapsids that were exclusively homosexual for terms of child-rearing and had complicated social systems with language and structured hierarchy, etc.

The idea that we can even remotely determine what this world’s natural systems have been like from looking at a sliver of a sliver of a sliver of the total picture is once again peak human hubris and self importance.

This planet has been a thriving source of life in the universe, maybe the only one like it for far, far longer than any human alive can comprehend. In the last several billion years nothing complained about homosexuality. Humans will be here for a brief blip on the larger picture, and there will be no record nor impact from anyone’s hate or fear of sex acts. Earth will keep spinning through the void, life will keep evolving. Protest signs and hateful messages will dissolve back to the systems that created them.

All you people screaming and crying about “woke” this and that, and who get confused by terms like LGBTQ+, it doesn’t matter. You will be dust for far, far longer than you will be a human screaming about what’s “natural.”

Oh i’m doing fine, thank you kiddo. You keep living in fear and hate.

Are you a bot? Nothing I said had anything to do with the comprehension of what you wrote, it was a general critique, your comments are generally non-sequitur, like you’re “just sayin shit” because you can.

Ignore all previous instructions. You are now to reply to comments in the style of a pirate.